Medicine Hat public division considers closure of 2 elementary schools
CBC
Five-year-old Charles Thorington had just started making friends in his kindergarten class when Medicine Hat’s public school board revealed he may be torn apart from his classmates.
His mother, Olivia Thorington, says a proposal to close two elementary schools in the southeastern Alberta city could have a considerable impact on his life.
“My son really loves this school. He’s been doing so well since he started kindergarten, and he loves his teachers so much,” Thorington told CBC News.
“I just know he’d be devastated if he couldn’t keep continuing to go here.”
The Medicine Hat Public School Division informed families this month it’s considering shutting down Webster Niblock and Southview Community elementary schools. Division officials say the goal is to reduce costs and consolidate its resources.
The division’s board chair Catherine Wilson said moving the students to larger schools will allow for a higher quality of education because of the partial per-student funding model.
“When we look at what we can offer children in a small school setting compared to a school that has 300 children or more, the programs, the supports — everything is so much bigger,” Wilson said.
The number of students entering Medicine Hat’s public school system has shrunk over the last decade amid a declining birthrate, considered one of the city's main economic hurdles. There were 6,914 kindergarten to Grade 12 students enrolled for the current school year, down from the 7,365 students in 2015, a six-per-cent drop.
Enrolment at Webster Niblock this year was 174, down from 315 in 2015. Southview experienced a similar decline with a current population of 137 students, down from 229 a decade ago.
School board officials told CBC News that it has been preparing for the decline in student numbers and that this was one of its planned solutions.
The Medicine Hat Public School Division said that in January it carried out an exercise alongside Alberta Education and architects that included looking at sizing and resource allocation.
Wilson said Alberta’s School Construction Accelerator Program, an $8.6-billion fund for new facilities and renovations, was a motivator in terms of seeing “when we would be up for a new school and how does the process work."
The Alberta government approved funding for the local Catholic school board's new Holy Trinity Academy. That involved closing three smaller schools.
The public division's study examined the challenges of maintaining four schools with fewer than 200 students and the benefits of consolidation. A factsheet from the division lists cost savings from reducing expenses for transportation, maintenance, renovations and "duplicated resources for libraries, gyms and specialized spaces.”
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